Science & Technology

Tiny amounts of crude oil on the water surface, less than one percent of the thickness of a hair, can damage seabird feathers, a new study finds.

Deep valleys buried under the seafloor of the North Sea record how the ancient ice sheets that used to cover the UK and Europe expelled water to stop themselves from collapsing.

In places like Wyoming and Idaho, ranchers have learned practical fencing strategies to help to reduce ill-fated encounters between hungry wildlife, vulnerable livestock and valuable produce. Researchers are learning to take advantage of this hard-won …

Investigators have improved the flavor of contemporary beer by identifying and engineering a gene that is responsible for much of the flavor of beer and some other alcoholic drinks.

The Great Salt Lake is getting saltier, creating a serious threat to the ecosystems and the economies that depend on it. New research examines the trajectory the two halves of the lake might take on a path to hyper-salinity.

A new article presents direct evidence of orcas killing white sharks in South Africa.

Corals live symbiotically with a variety of microscopic algae that provide most of the energy corals require, and some algae can make coral more resilient to heat stress. In assessing one of the main reef builders in Hawai’i, Montipora capitata or rice…

Scientists are suggesting something is missing from the typical roster of chemicals that astrobiologists use to search for life on planets around other stars — laughing gas.

New findings by tobacco researchers may lead to urgent recommendations for doctors to help patients quit smoking as a way of countering COVID-19.

A simple two-carbon compound may have been a crucial player in the evolution of metabolism before the advent of cells, according to a new study. The finding potentially sheds light on the earliest stages of prebiotic biochemistry, and suggests how ATP …

New research supports the hypothesis that Alzheimer’s disease is caused by a decline in levels of a protein called amyloid-beta.

The researchers’ unique platform solves a key problem in water harvesting: Collected water droplets form a thermal barrier that prevents further condensation, so they need to be removed from the surface as rapidly as possible to make room for more harv…

The evolutionary pros and cons of group living vary for males and females, according to a study of ostriches.

A new technique enables on-device training of machine-learning models on edge devices like microcontrollers, which have very limited memory. This could allow edge devices to continually learn from new data, eliminating data privacy issues, while enabli…

Researchers describe how different types of repetitive DNA elements are controlled by the same silencing mechanism in fruit fly ovaries. Central to their findings is an uncharacterized protein that the researchers named ‘Kipferl’, which ensures the eff…

A new system of algorithms enables four-legged robots to walk and run on challenging terrain while avoiding both static and moving obstacles. The work brings researchers a step closer to building robots that can perform search and rescue missions or co…

Enrollment has begun in an early-stage clinical trial evaluating bacteriophage therapy in adults with cystic fibrosis (CF) who carry Pseudomonas aeruginosa (P. aeruginosa) in their lungs. The trial is evaluating whether the bacteriophage, or ‘phage,’ t…

Researchers have identified a pathway in the brains of mice that is activated when the animals see other mice scratching and that, surprisingly, does not involve the brain’s visual cortex.

Planetary scientists identified a potential source of a special kind of meteorite. Its characteristics could explain certain discrepancies in how near-Earth asteroids are classified.

The microscopic creatures like geckos and octopuses fabricated by 3D laser printing could open up new opportunities in fields such as microrobotics or biomedicine. These ‘life-like’ 3D microstructures are made from novel smart polymers whose size and m…